Posts tagged: dev

All posts with the tag "dev"

285 posts latest post 2026-05-02
Publishing rhythm
Mar 2026 | 3 posts

Big fan of Primes setup. I was not far off of his setup before he really came on the scene, but I’ve picked up a ton of nuggets from him and how he operates. I took his first developer productivity course on Front End Masters as it came out.

It is interesting to see him roll back his ansible scripts for bash scripts here. I converted my setup to ansible after watching his first, but have also since rolled back to bash scripts for quite similar reasons. Ansible is great for remote tasks that need to be done on a fleet of machines, but like he says here overkill for this purpose and ends up something that you need to read the docs for every change to your dotfiles.

Unlike prime I’ve really leaned harder on installing everything in a docker image and developing out of a docker image. I’ve long built docker images of my dotfiles with the idea that its nice to be able to just use them on other machines, but it rarely happened.

In the past year I’ve moved bazzite, an immutable distro. It comes with podman and distrobox, so I install very little on it, a few flatpaks from the store for brave and signal, but most of what I really use day to day comes from my devtainer. It’s nice...

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markdown split panel

Today I was playing with markdown split panels. I want to be able to compare and constrast occasionually, today the inspiration hit to do this using admonitions.

screenshot-2025-02-04T02-28-46-750Z.png

This is what I am going for, one admonition that is easy to remember, that nests inside of itself , and I can put as much markdown on the inside that I want.

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I’ve been back to putting some images on my blog lately and thinking about making them a bit thinner through the use of aspect ratio for simplicity. I’m leaning pretty heavy on tailwindcss these days due to some weird quirks of markdown-it-attrs I cannot have slashes in classes from markdown so I made a .cinematic class to achieve this.

.cinematic { @apply aspect-[2.39/1]; }

Example

screenshot-2025-01-31T14-50-00-094Z.png

Attrs does not like ‘/’ characters in its classes, so to use some tailwind classes with custom values we must make new classes in our tailwind input css.

.cinematic { @apply aspect-[2.39/1]; }

Given the following markdown with attrs added to the image and to the paragraph block.

![screenshot-2025-01-31T14-50-00-094Z.png](https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/api/file/50cfa8dc-9d46-4f02-877b-688fa5510a83.png){.aspect-[2.39/1]} ![screenshot-2025-01-31T14-50-00-094Z.png](https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/api/file/50cfa8dc-9d46-4f02-877b-688fa5510a83.png){.cinematic} {.cinematic} ![screenshot-2025-01-31T14-50-00-094Z.png](https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/api/file/50cfa8dc-9d46-4f02-877b-688fa5510a83.png)

We get the following output with only the middle one working correctly.

screenshot-2025-01-31T14-50-00-094Z.png{.aspect-[2.39/1]}

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hover z-index and positioning

I broke my sick wikilink hover recently in a refactor, today I did some diving in to figure out what happened.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the link is in a list of links, and when the hover image pops up it sits behind all of the other text. The z-index of the list-item is supposed to be raised above the others on hover.

Manually setting z-index to 20 in the inspector I noticed this message from devtools, “The position: static property prevents z-index from having an effect. Try setting position to something other than...

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Don’t stop learning! Stop trying because you have a doomer outlook on ai, llms, industry and think they are taking over. If you have no hope for the future, if you stop now you are cementing in that you will be no good and the ai will be better. Many, maybe most of us in this industry go here by hard work, long nights of learning, trying to solve problems that our job had. If llms take over then the world is going to be a whole lot different, it will be a world you cannot predict or plan for. For now put your head down and succeed in the world we have today.

TEEJ has some great thoughts on this whole sentiment, put this on for you morning walk or whatever you do.

I like the charts that Theo brings to to these videos. Shout out for a positive k8s reference and not shitting on it.

Htmx brings html/css just a bit further down the complexity graph with little to no extra effort, while react allows us to go all the way full complexity at the cost of build and dev complexity to go from zero to 100 as soon as its introduced.

htmx brings us back to the ease of jquery ajax without any complex swapping or json parsing, all of the object parsing and html templating is done in the backend, the front end just tracks where to put it. HTMX couples the frontend and backend much tigher, since all of the front end html is generated in the backend, done correctly it is not possible for the front end to get out of sync and try to do things that the back end does not know how to handle, vice versa.

nice overview of availability measurements and what they really mean. The crazy world we live in today depends on so many things runnig, its also so hard to measure your uptime, The uptime metrics can mean a lot of different things. The site is up and accepting traffic, but can users make changes or submit orders, there is a lot more to it than just up or down. I really appreciate Brittany’s story from Nike nested in there.

Just tried using my twitter api key for the first time in quite awhile. Apps now need to be tied to projects in order to work. It looks like projects are where pricing comes into play. Thankfully they still give a free tier for doing small time things for myself. You can really see the effect that llms have on these things though as it is 5x more expensive to read posts than to make posts currently. Data is the new gold for these kind of companies.

I can say I had the same kind of feelings when I first saw something called “Own Your Web” being run in Buttondown. I totally get it. It takes time and effort to build your own stuff, email sending is hard, not done right ends you in the spam folder. There is something about the name though that I think needs to set an example and self host as much as it possibly can.

The changelog has covered this several times, do they need to go to the crazy lengths they do to run their site, no probably not, but it keeps them in the loop. They are using the tech they talk about in a very real and production critical way to run the show.

Cant wait to see more from ownyourweb.site

Chris Coyier had a small re-align on his site, some good nuggets in here.

I like the idea of having a photo of myself prominently on the site, so you know who you’re dealing with here.

I really like this after thinking about it and I think I am going to make sure I get my face back on my posts. I do have my 8bit style pixel art image of me that I use on social media, but no real picture.

I feel like a lot of people redesign their entire website when it’s time to update to the latest list of social networks and I’m no different. Once you touch it you gotta keep going.

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I’ve only recently learned what colophon means, and I really like to read through site that use it. If you don’t know its about how the site is built. I’ve always liked peeking under the hood of things to understand how they work, it’s what turned me towards an engineering degree.

I love how he mentions that he chose the name when he was 17 and he is stuck with it. I particularly like the name, it has something special to it. Hats off to you for doing something that has lasted so long for you. I fully understand though, I have projects that I made a year ago that I think why did I name it that. At the same time when I try to think of a name I end up with the I don’t have anything good and I’d rather build the thing so fuck it, its going to be what it is.

A nice list of slashpages you might want to consider including / aliasing / 301ing. These feel like nice things to setup and keep in the back pocket for obsidian style wiki link to easily. I get kinda bad at wiki-linking as much as I would like to, mostly because it does require some amount of work to make the page, and keep it up to date over time, then remember that you even have it.

Some are serious, some very common, some quite useful.

/colophon

Colophon a page that describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies

All posts on this site are written by Waylon Walker, the typical content has changed and evolved over time. I go back and make a few corrections, but for the most part things stay pretty much as they were published originally.

see more in Waylon Walker

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Theo does a fantastic history of serverless here.

Theo can’t have an infra video without shitting on k8s. Specifically people who have never touched k8s pushing fear of k8s to large audiences of people who have never touched k8s. If you are a webdev who solely lives in webdev space and never touches as much as a dockerfile listen to him. If you touch infra at all try it before you take his opinion at face value.

If you plan on having traffic spikes 10x your regular traffic for something like black friday, serverless might be right for your use case.

He argues that targeting a stateless deployment of serverless leads to better code. I’d like to see more examples here. Maybe most of the code bases I work on already do this. I’ve never targeted a serverless deployment, but I’ve targeted horizontally scaled deployments many times and they feel like they have the same targets. For instance if I spin up 8 pods for my application or uvicorn with 3 workers I have to target statelessness, all of the state must live in the database and cannot live in memory. Even if I target 1 instance in a containerized environment I have to be ready for restarts at any point in time.

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